Mark Johnson has been musing about golf, fly fishing and, eventually, hockey the past few days while sitting behind a microphone at the Frozen Four, and one of the constant themes was life lessons.
Wise people, the University of Wisconsin women’s hockey coach said on the eve of his 12th appearance in an NCAA championship game, learn from the experiences that life throws their way. Wiser people, he continued, take knowledge from the journeys of others.
Match Day — the long-awaited moment when medical students nationwide learn where they’ll begin their residencies — arrived Friday at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
For Samantha Bush, it wasn’t just about where she’d spend the next few years of her training, it was about continuing a mission she started years ago.
“We thought this was a one-off: one bird to one cow, and we wouldn’t see that again,” says Peter Halfmann, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Influenza Research Institute.
Yet the more severe human cases are concurrent with the spread of a recently mutated, potentially more dangerous version of the virus called the D1.1 genotype. D1.1. is now circulating among wild birds and poultry, and it has spilled over into dairy cows at least twice in 2025, according milk testing data from the Agriculture Department. With D1.1, Halfmann explains that the threshold for cross-species transfer is “much lower than we previously thought.”
Travis Pickering, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who helped discover, identify, and describe the fossil, says he was “ecstatic” when he saw the bones.
“A find like this, in this context — that is, millions of years old and from a cave, which is extremely dynamic in terms of things like the build-up sediment, rockfall from the roof, the activities of prehistoric animals that dwelled in it, including eating and chewing bone — is as rare as finding hen’s teeth,” he says. “I couldn’t be happier.”
The vast majority of raw milk cheese should be safe after the 60-day aging window, according to Keith Poulsen, DVM, PhD, a clinical associate professor of medical sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine.
“We have a lot of history and data to back that up,” Poulsen told Verywell in an email. “Unfortunately, the data from Cornell suggests that if raw milk cheeses were made on an affected farm, they would not be recommended for consumption.”
Simon Gilroy is a professor of botany at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who regularly designs spaceflight experiments with NASA. When asked if he thinks we are using astrobiological research enough to improve our sustainability on Earth, Professor Gilroy pointed to the discourse around urban farming, an approach which involves moving some elements of cultivation and productivity into cities instead of using agricultural fields.
Speaking to Interesting Engineering, Professor Gilroy observed that urban environments have many of the same problems as growing plants in space, including challenges around water delivery, maintaining environment within the desired parameters and dealing with pathogen outbreaks. “So there’s a lot of technology development going on in space, which has real applications when you come back to thinking about those kinds of applications on Earth,” he noted.
Anne Morgan Giroux is pretty sure the cure for epilepsy ‒ or at least a long-term solution for millions ‒ is sitting in a university lab in Madison, Wisconsin. She and a team of researchers need just $3.3 million to push it across the finish line.
The problem: That $3.3 million solution is on indefinite hold as President Donald Trump and his administration slashes government spending. The money would have been awarded as grants from the National Institutes of Health to launch human trials. Epilepsy affects about 1% of U.S. adults, or around 3 million people.
Already DOGE has canceled many contracts at Social Security, just as it has at many other federal agencies. A DOGE-run website late last week listed $50.3 million in cost savings from these canceled agreements. That included funding for a University of Wisconsin at Madison study project to understand how to prevent impostor scams. Government impostor scams — most commonly pretending to be from the Social Security office — resulted in estimated losses of at least $577 million last year, often by conning seniors into sharing personal data, according to the agency’s IG office.
“When you cut resources like this, there’s always room to make things more efficient. But you also could make things worse,” said Cliff Robb, a University of Wisconsin professor who has studied impostor scams. “You could end up making fraud worse.”
The bright evening colors come when small particles in the atmosphere cause light to scatter, explained Steven Ackerman, professor of meteorology at University of Wisconsin–Madison, in an online article.
“If the path is long enough, all of the blue and violet light scatters out of your line of sight,” Ackerman said. “The other colors continue on their way to your eyes.”
Kimber Wilkerson, a professor of special education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said 504 Plans tend to be less formal than an IEP. They usually represent a collaboration between parents and school leaders to figure out what the student needs to be successful at school. For a student with ADHD, that might be extra time to take tests. For a student with Type 1 diabetes, it could be access to snacks during the day.
In reality, Wilkerson said, many teachers would be willing to extend those kinds of accommodations to students who needed them, even without documentation. But the advantage of a 504 Plan is that families don’t have to re-explain their situation to a new teacher every time the student advances to a new grade, she said. That’s especially important when students reach middle and high school, where they have several teachers throughout the day instead of just one.
While the dollar figures have become eye-popping, electing one judge to a 10-year term on a seven-member court can have a greater influence on a range of policy issues than electing a single lawmaker to a larger legislative body for a shorter term, said Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
“So maybe it’s surprising it took this long for the money and the parties and the ideological groups to find these races, but now it seems impossible to unwind,” Burden said.
“By trying to protect certain industries, you can actually make other industries more vulnerable,” Lydia Cox, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies international trade, said during a recent webinar.
Sara McKinnon, a professor of rhetoric, politics and culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that the images of the deportations are intended for the Trump administration to show its power to remove migrants.
“We didn’t see visualities of the deportation flights really at all during the first Trump administration,” McKinnon said. “We’re living in a different moment of spectacle, a different moment of visuality, and I think because there’s such a blurriness between what is entertainment media and what is news media, the administration is really playing on that.”
In designing the student housing community Chapter Madison, near the University of Wisconsin-Madison, St. Louis-based designer of student and multifamily residential settings CRG focused on the experiences of residents as they interact with spaces.
“With each project we’re becoming more empathetic developers,” says Alison Mills, CRG senior vice president of design and development. “Designing with residents in mind – creating a memorable first impression and a well-designed environment that’s responsive to their needs and enhances their quality of life – is the ultimate goal of every project.”
